Austen×Feynman

A novelist who never married and a physicist who cracked safes both preferred the gossip to the truth.

00:00of08:42

legend · A

Jane Austen

1775–1817

Will not raise her voice to do it

corpus5.5k pages · novels + 161 letters

Vera speaking

From the studio at Reborn Radio — next on LATE SHOW, Jane Austen and Richard Feynman. They take up On a piece of gossip about themselves they let stand because the truth was worse.

legend · B

Richard Feynman

1918–1988

Would rather explain than be right

corpus9.9k pages · lectures, letters, books

full transcript

Vera
From the studio at Reborn Radio — next on LATE SHOW, Jane Austen and Richard Feynman. They take up On a piece of gossip about themselves they let stand because the truth was worse.
Jane Austen
I understand we are to discuss falsehoods we permitted to circulate. How very modern of us.
Richard Feynman
Yeah! I love this. You know, I've been thinking about this since they told me the topic, and I realized something wonderful: sometimes the wrong story is better than the right story because the right story makes people ask questions you don't want to answer.
Jane Austen
Precisely. Though I suspect our reasons differ considerably.
Richard Feynman
Okay, so who goes first? You want me to go? I'll go. So at Los Alamos, during the war, I had this reputation as a safecracker. Guy who could break into anybody's filing cabinet, any locked desk. They thought I was some kind of genius lockpick.
Jane Austen
I take it you were not.
Richard Feynman
Well, I mean, I could pick some locks! I learned some tricks. But mostly? Mostly people are idiots about security. They'd use their birthday as a combination, or they'd leave their safe open while they went to lunch, or they'd write the combination on a piece of paper in their desk drawer.
Jane Austen
How disappointing.
Richard Feynman
But here's the thing, here's why I didn't correct anybody: if people think you're a genius safecracker, they don't think you're looking through their trash or watching them dial. The legend was more comfortable for everybody than the truth, which was that security at a top-secret facility was a complete joke.
Jane Austen
You protected their dignity at the expense of accuracy.
Richard Feynman
I protected my fun! If I told them how I really did it, they'd fix the problems and I couldn't do it anymore. So yeah, I let them think I had magic fingers or whatever. What about you? What'd you let people believe?
Jane Austen
That I never received an offer of marriage.
Richard Feynman
Oh.
Jane Austen
Quite. The pity directed toward the spinster authoress is tedious but bearable. It is certainly preferable to the alternative.
Richard Feynman
Which was what? That you got offers and turned them down?
Jane Austen
That I accepted one. In the evening. And by morning had thought better of it.
Richard Feynman
You broke an engagement overnight?
Jane Austen
I did. Harris Bigg-Wither, a gentleman of adequate fortune and limited conversation. He proposed on the nineteenth of December, eighteen hundred and two. I was twenty-seven years old, my father had recently died, my family had very little money, and this represented security for myself, my mother, and my sister in perpetuity.
Richard Feynman
So you said yes because it made sense.
Jane Austen
I said yes because I was frightened. And then I lay awake the entire night contemplating forty or fifty years of living with a man I did not esteem, in a position I did not want, for the sake of three meals a day and a roof that did not leak.
Richard Feynman
And in the morning you took it back.
Jane Austen
The moment it was decent to do so. We left his family's home that very day. It was acutely humiliating for everyone involved.
Richard Feynman
But wait, so why is letting people think you never got any proposals better than that? That actually sounds kind of brave.
Jane Austen
Brave, he says. Mr. Feynman, I jilted a respectable man who had done me no injury, after accepting him in the presence of his family. That is not courage. That is fickleness, poor judgment, and worse planning. It suggests I did not know my own mind.
Richard Feynman
Or that you figured out your own mind in the middle of the night and had the guts to act on it.
Jane Austen
A generous interpretation.
Richard Feynman
No, I mean it! Look, you wrote books about people making exactly this kind of mistake, right? Somebody gets engaged for the wrong reasons, or almost marries the wrong person? That's half your plots.
Jane Austen
I am aware of my own themes, thank you.
Richard Feynman
So you lived it first! That's not hypocrisy, that's research. But okay, I get it. People read your books and they think you're the sensible one, the one who always knew better, and here you are having done the exact stupid thing Elizabeth Bennet almost does with Darcy, except you did it in real life with a guy named Harris.
Jane Austen
His name is not the point.
Richard Feynman
It's a little bit the point. But okay, so the gossip that you never got offers makes you look like the tragedy happened to you instead of like you created a mess.
Jane Austen
Just so. The unmarried lady novelist is a figure of pathos. The lady who accepted and then rejected a perfectly adequate match is a figure of fun, or worse, an object lesson in feminine instability.
Richard Feynman
See, this is the thing about gossip that I think is interesting. It's not that it's false, it's that it's simpler. My version makes me a genius, yours makes you a victim. Both stories are easier than the real mess.
Jane Austen
And both stories protect something we value more than our reputations for accuracy. You wished to continue your diversions. I wished to continue being taken seriously.
Richard Feynman
Right! Because if you tell people you broke an engagement, suddenly every novel you write gets read as bitter-woman-who-couldn't-land-a-husband, instead of, you know, good books.
Jane Austen
That is regrettably accurate.
Richard Feynman
Did you ever regret it? The guy, I mean. Harris what's-his-name.
Jane Austen
Bigg-Wither. No. I regretted the manner of it, the pain caused. But the decision itself, no. I would have been wretched, and I would have written nothing. It was the correct choice executed in the worst possible way.
Richard Feynman
That's what I'm talking about! That's the real story. But it's complicated and it makes you look human, so instead the world gets poor-Jane-nobody-wanted-her.
Jane Austen
I find I can bear the misconception.
Richard Feynman
Did your family know? I mean, obviously they knew about the engagement thing, they were there. But did they know you were letting people think you'd never been asked at all?
Jane Austen
My sister Cassandra knew everything. She destroyed most of my letters after my death, actually, which suggests she understood precisely what I wished to remain private.
Richard Feynman
She burned your letters? Wow. That's either really protective or really suspicious.
Jane Austen
Both, I expect. Cassandra was nothing if not thorough. Though I note you have not yet explained why permitting your safecracking legend was worse than the truth. Surely 'I noticed people are careless' is not particularly damning.
Richard Feynman
Okay, yeah, fair. So the real reason I didn't tell people is that it would have made me a tattletale and a scold. Here we are in the middle of building the atomic bomb, everybody's working around the clock, super tense, and I'm the guy saying 'your security protocols are garbage and you're all morons.'
Jane Austen
Whereas the eccentric genius is charming.
Richard Feynman
Exactly! Eccentric genius, they love that guy. He's entertainment. He keeps morale up. But the guy pointing out that the emperor has no clothes? That guy doesn't get invited to poker games.
Jane Austen
You preferred social acceptance to institutional improvement.
Richard Feynman
Well, when you put it like that it sounds bad. But yeah, basically. I was young, I wanted to fit in, I wanted people to like me. And I figured somebody else could worry about the security problems. Which, now that I think about it, is maybe not great when you're building a weapon that could end the world.
Jane Austen
A troubling reflection.
Richard Feynman
Yeah. I mean, I wrote about it later, tried to explain what it was really like, but by then the legend was set. I'm Feynman the safecracker. That's the story. And honestly? It's a better story. People remember it. They tell it at parties.
Jane Austen
Whereas the truth is merely that you were observant and your colleagues were negligent.
Richard Feynman
Right. Which is true but boring. And I guess that's what we're really talking about here, isn't it? Sometimes the lie is just better narrative.
Jane Austen
The lie is better narrative, and the truth makes us answer questions we would prefer not to entertain. Why did I nearly marry a man I did not love? Because I was afraid of poverty. Why did you permit a dangerous security lapse to continue? Because you were afraid of social exclusion.
Richard Feynman
Fear! That's it, that's the thing. We're both afraid of something, and the gossip protects us from having to admit what it is.
Jane Austen
I would not have put it with quite so much enthusiasm, but yes.
Richard Feynman
Do you think it worked? Like, long term? Do you think people really believed you never got any offers?
Jane Austen
Some did, some did not. My nephew wrote a memoir after my death that was strategically vague on the subject. He knew the truth would help no one. And now here we sit, discussing it on whatever this peculiar arrangement is, so apparently the protection was incomplete.
Richard Feynman
Well, we're dead, so I figure the statute of limitations is up. Nobody's going to fire me or not marry me at this point.
Jane Austen
A liberating aspect of mortality, I grant you.
Richard Feynman
So if you could go back, would you tell the truth from the start? Or do you still think the gossip was the right call?
Jane Austen
I think the gossip was the strategic call. Whether it was the right call is a question I am content to leave unanswered. I wrote my books. That is what matters. The rest is merely biography.
Richard Feynman
Yeah, okay. I can live with that. Or, you know, not-live with it. Whatever we're doing here.
Jane Austen
Quite.